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silentbrad sends this snippet from PCGamer:
"After stepping back as lead designer of Minecraft earlier this year, Notch has been considering what to do next. ... While he's still deciding exactly what he wants to work on, he told us that he'd quite like to do a sandbox space trading game like Elite, 'except done right.' Notch is aiming for something with a bit more character than the classic trading sim. Instead of being the spaceship, you'd be a character inside the spaceship. 'I want the space game that's more like Firefly,' he said. 'I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.' He hasn't decided to make the game yet, and doesn't mind if someone else takes up the reins. 'If someone steals the idea before me, that's totally fine. I just want to play that game,' he said."

So which character on the ship do you want to be? If you enjoy putting out fires you're probably going to pick engineer. So the entire game will consist of you fixing machines. You don't need a space game for that. On the other hand if you pick captain, you'll probably just yell at your crew to put out fires, since you'll be too busy dealing with whatever hostile ship CAUSED your fire.

. On the other hand if you pick captain, you'll probably just yell at your crew to put out fires, since you'll be too busy dealing with whatever hostile ship CAUSED your fire.

Of course as Captain -- since you won't be either Helm or Fire Control -- you won't be able to fly the ship or fire at the hostile, so your options for "dealing with them" will consist entirely of saying "Onscreen!" and delivering stinging insults about their dress sense.

It's called "X: Rebirth" [deepsilver.com] and is a follow-on to the quite successful X series of games (the current version being X3:Albion Prelude). These are pretty much Elite type trading/fighting sandboxes, but with multiple ships, remote controlled fleets (ie you can buy traders and set them off on autopilot trading for you), fighting (of course, but with wingmen ships or just sent your fleet of frigates or carriers to defend your trading sectors from the bad aliens, robot aliens or pirates), plus missions to keep things interesting - both small "transport a passenger to x", and large "follow a whole set of missions in a series to do something major".

What's a bit special (and controversial in the X community) is that the new game will be based around a single spacecraft (previously you could decide what kind of ship to pilot) but that has different 'rooms' to play from - so your co-pilot can be set to fly while you remote-control your combat drones or play the stock market or whatever.

Nobody's quite sure exactly what it'll be like, but I think we can be confident Egosoft will pull the rabbit out, X3 served me very well for over a year, and I still didn't manage to finish all the plot missions. You can buy X3 on steam or impulse (or whatever impulse is called nowadays) for next to nothing, it cost me $10 in a special offer that seems to be repeated regularly.

That rumour has been going around for years- it was already an old rumour when I stopped playing 3 or so years ago.

As far as I'm aware, they've implemented some simple "walking in stations" concept, but since lost interest in developing it further. So probably going to be fully delivered at about the same time Satan goes shopping for wooly jumpers.

I honestly have no desire to play minecraft, but I read that interview with Notch.

He's legit, the real deal. He's an O.G. gamer like me. I have honestly played more games on Commodore 64 than my 5 consoles and PC combined. And I've played a lot of PC games.

That said, I've been dreaming for so long of a space sim that doesn't focus only on one thing like combat or trading. I want to roam the ship like I do the Normandy. I want to make connections to people, places and feel someth

Omfg yes, me too. I read this and was gleeful, as in "Oh goody goody gumdrops, tee hee hee" giddy. Yes, I tee hee'ed like a little girl.

I fucking hate EVE and it's "lets be a space ship" mediocrity. I'm playing SWTOR and it's a gas bag of a half baked game, a complete douchbag copy of WoW mechanics, the space aspect of it is on RAILS FFS. That lamo tech was out when the ORIGINAL damn SW came out, sweet jesus what passes muster these days is damn pathetic.

I like some of the ideas behind EVE... it's really more of an business/economy sim than anything else, except it has cool space graphics. And occasional "rock-paper-scissors" in space which is the best description I've heard of its PvP. Every 6 months or so EVE sends me 5 free days of play, which is enough to get bored of learning and grinding for the next 6 months.

But yeah, I'd much rather be flying... Vendetta Online is pretty decent at that, though I've kinda become disappointed with the ways they've

Speak for yourself. I feel I've gotten my money's worth several times over, even playing without mods. I've spent a hell of a lot more time playing Minecraft than I have some more recent titles that cost considerably more.

I agree that Minecraft is missing a lot. When jeb took over, however, the game has been noticeably improving. Patches are coming pretty consistently now and they're really changing the game for the better.

I think Notch is better at the initial idea than the long-term execution. He's like a Stage 1 rocket booster - he gets the idea off the ground and pretty far, but don't depend on him to make it all the way to the end.

For the reasons above, I doubt his ability to finish something good. Start it? Sure. But put out a finished, quality product? He seems to have a hard time doing that.

Not to mention having the most hideously atrocious, inefficient game engine in recent memory. Even if we take into account that it's written in Java, it's still mind-bogglingly AWFUL. Other games will do exponentially more with geometry, physics, lighting, etc and still get better framerates on the same hardware. Hell, make a moderately large redstone device and watch what happens. It chugs like hell over something SIMPLE. Personally, just about everyone at Mojang should never be able to write another line

To build on your points... I'm not going to waste time with the changelog looking for examples. But how fucked is your code base if you have something like, "implemented random rain effect, but now arrows go through walls."

Tell me about it! The Minecraft servers I run each use more CPU time and memory sitting idle with no players than one of the Team Fortress 2 servers does when it's half full. Every so often they like to suddenly grab a ton of CPU time and cause lag spikes in TF2.

I've not played Minecraft (it looks like the sort of game that would end up being a massive time sink), but my understanding is that the server is running large 3D cellular automata even with no players. In contrast, TF2 servers don't really do much beyond sending small sets of coordinate data between clients.

Coding isn't just about writing amazingly optimized code, or running as close to the metal as you can get; or heck, it isn't even about not crashing. The whole reason for Java and the other high level languages is so that less analytical geniuses and more artists/thinkers can get into programing.
Notch is a perfect example of a regular guy, who isn't really the greatest coder or artist, but never-the-less, still managed to outdo every single 100+ team dev house. Why? 1. the balls to buck absolutely every convention. 2. the presence of high level abstracted languages and libraries for him to build on. 3. the willingness to borrow from what comes before (Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress, Gary's Mod) 4. pure damn luck.
Notch is a phenomenon, not simply because minecraft is an amazing game, but because we love a rags-to-riches storyline:)

It is, however, a fully-functional 3D Lego set the approximate size of the planet Neptune. Snipe around the edges all you want, take what I'll call cheap shots, that's what it is and I'm glad to have it. It gets my kid off the kill-everything games and he and we build stuff that has him wanting to show it off. There was nothing like it before, its value already exceeds the price I paid, and it keeps getting better. This game's in the same category as Warband and AI War, I got what I paid for and I keep

I only had this problem on machines without any graphics acceleration, or a ridiculously small amount of memory.

I havent seen very many games like minecraft-- fully open-ended map with a fully destructable and constructable enviornment-- so Im not sure what game you are comparing it to. Keep in mind that with far vision, you are loading a huge number of blocks at the horizon, and the game needs to have terrain in memory beyond that unless you want massive drive thrashing when you move in that direction; an

Because one must have created a similar, superior product before criticising or forming an opinion. NIckelback is fucking awesome and you can't say otherwise until you personally publish your own albums. Plan 9 from Outer Space was a fucking awesome movie and you can't say otherwise until you personally create your own films. The Ford Pinto was a fucking awesome car and you can't say otherwise until you personally build your own cars. GWB was a fucking awesome president and you can't say otherwise until you

I'd agree if it was a full-price 60+ dollar game, but most people paid like 5-10 bucks for Minecraft (if they bought it in alpha or beta, which most did). There's easily $10 of content in there. Hell I've put more hours into MC than any other game in the last 2 years... definitely worth the money. And I'm still enjoying it... making my little cities bigger and bigger.

If you like the creative building aspect of it (like me), it's fantastic. If you want an actual game with lots of 'content', then yeah, I gu

Minecraft is nowhere complete. It has 1% of the content a game like that should have. Personally I will never give Notch another cent. He starts games, makes promises, and then doesn't finish them. Minecraft was an innovative concept, nothing more. Notch did nothing with it. Nothing. Now all the players of Minecraft are relying on modders to make the game fun. It shouldn't be that way.

I'm a bit puzzled. What could you add to the game that would make it better rather than worse?

Are you kidding?Minecraft is nowhere complete. It has 1% of the content a game like that should have. Personally I will never give Notch another cent. He starts games, makes promises, and then doesn't finish them. Minecraft was an innovative concept, nothing more. Notch did nothing with it. Nothing. Now all the players of Minecraft are relying on modders to make the game fun. It shouldn't be that way.

You're right. What minecraft really needs is a few romance options some poorly written plot elements and an epic ending where the ceiling collapses and everyone dies.

Well, Wing commander was fun for FPS style.
Home... something was enjoyable as RTS
You know what kills space sims? Realism.
I really dont want to spend half my time running through boring empty space.
This is the problem.... you can develop sandbox FPSes like Minecraft, Scyrim, and others because... well, there is stuff to do along the way.
Do I really feel like running around a small ship repairing the same crap? Nope, having sex with the same crew members, nope... eating over and over and then working o

frontier/frontier first encounters style, by having time compression(well sure.. it did also have some other freedoms from realism and the jump engines of course. but they're the least arcade space sims there is - and they have planets. and not just some shitty 'lets make planet level to this mission' planets. but planets which were the right size.). so it took days and weeks to get around even if you had a sports spaceship. but it didn't matt

Unfortunately, the first semester of any Computer Games Development degree course is filled with kids who think just that - I like playing games, I have an idea, I would have fun building what I like to play. The second semester of those courses are usually much less full...

The gory details of creating games usually murders the fun of playing them:(

The difference is that Notch not only has the talent to pull it off, but also the money to buy the help to finish it off if he wants to get onto the next cool thing. He even hired a separate CEO to manage the business and financial affairs so really the only thing he needs to do is simply write the software.

I think Notch could write a lame version of Pong and still sell over a million copies at the moment from his fanbase, so the fact it may be successful is almost irrelevant too.

I don't doubt he as the talent to pull it off, but I would love to know how often he plays Minecraft...

My point is, engaging in your hobby as an actual act of work usually destroys the hobby aspect - trawling through the bug reports and spending days tracking down that one elusive but deadly bug kills the fun aspect very quickly.

Writing the game you want to play will probably result in you never playing it for fun.

I'll be the first to admit that what Notch has developed is not release grade software, and their software testing model is non-existent much less any sort of efficiency. I've seen some mods that vastly improve Minecraft, but from the perspective of improved chunk generation and development and even display efficiency. Mods like Optifine are used not just for higher resolution textures, but simply to improve framerate even for lower resolution textures.

Very true. Like I've said, it's a fun game. Notch would make a good director/manager/PR guy. He's good at that. But when you can't even implement relatively simple new features because it murders system resources...then it's time to go back to the basics.

I loved the idea of Elite but the implementation (particularly the later ones) was always a bit off for me. The crew based thing would be quite a bit of fun. Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.

I loved the idea of Elite but the implementation (particularly the later ones) was always a bit off for me. The crew based thing would be quite a bit of fun. Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.

I want a remake of Psi 5 Trading Company [cerebus.de]. That's a great game which I still play now and again - for those that don't know it, you're the Captain of a freight-carring star ship and you command your crew. You can do nothing directly, all actions occur because you've instructed your crew to carry them out.

I'm a massive Elite (original, never got into Frontier) fan too - have a look at Oolite [oolite.org] for a modern remake.

It's very vaguely related to what you've described, but have you tried Majesty (on PC and recently also iOS/Android)? It's a fantasy "RTS", sorta, except that every unit is really a unique hero with stats, XP, inventory, spellbook etc, and you don't control them or even order them in any way beyond hiring them. The closest it comes to that is setting bounties for things you want to get done, like a reward for a killed monster or destroyed monster lair - but heroes are free to ignore those if they don't cons

>Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.

That is the sort of game I want to make, but it is far too ambitious a project for one person to undertake all at once. So for now I am focusing on developing the underlying technologies required to make a 'lite' version of my 'ultimate' open ended space game. Once I have a stable foundation I will expand it with additional features but until then my design dictates the absolute most simplistic implementation of the core features

It's been an oft-asked for feature in Vegastrike. [sourceforge.net] And they've already got the flying around in space and trading stuff covered. Maybe he could do the "I'm just a space janitor" portion that no one seems to want to do?

Vega Strike is the furthest-along general purpose space sim and it needs love.

The most-requested feature AFAIK is still continuous planetary flightThe second-most is FPS, so there you go.

They DON'T have the trading stuff covered in that game, though. First of all, the planetary navigation interface is awful in every way. Second, they don't have a functional economy. I stopped playing because your actions have no consequences beyond your reputation score. That's dumb. I won't play any space sim that goes dee

In case there are Elite fans out there who haven't heard of it; check out Oolite http://www.oolite.org/ [oolite.org].
It's an open source version that is nicely done. Available on Linux, MacOS & Windows.

I also want to play that game. Wanted to play it for 15 years. Yes, I know there are/were some contenders out there, X3, Evochron Mercenary, Privateer... while each game had it strengths, they lacked the overall appeal of Elite. I want to fly the depths of space and over the surfaces of alien planets. If there is trade, factions, vast space, missions, an optional main quest, decent combat, and then at the end of the day I can get out of my spaceship to take a stroll on an alien colony, I will create my own little shrine dedicated to Notch.

FTL [kickstarter.com]It is a spaceship roguelike where you actually control the ship up close, rather than directly.Glad it got funded, these guys sound pretty good and the idea sounds solid.

Would like to see him have a try at it. So little actual decent space-trading games that are full-on, large or even fun.So many of them are just a plain chore to get in to, and you can lose everything just like that.Quite literally a second job to get in to in order to even play most of them.

Actually, Wayne is working on an updated version -- I'm constrained from doing so, not because of Wayne but because of a patent case I worked on as a consulting expert that put me under a protective order not to do certain types of development until the case was settled...bruce..

I was going to post that, but it's hard to beat it coming from the original developer.

On a possibly-not-approved-by-said-developer note, if you want to play it you can find ways to do so that involve Atari ST emulators and bootleg content. The actual title of the game was "Sundog: Frozen Legacy"

Oh, I more than approve of that.:-) I've played both the Apple II and the Atari ST versions on Windows-based emulators and used to have links to both on my website. I should probably put those up again.

I played that on the Atari ST. It was fun. You had to maintain and upgrade your ship, while building up your cash by trading, all the while gathering the colonists for a new world that your inheritance depended on you setting up (thus: Sundog: Frozen Legacy)

Heh. Actually, I'm more than happy to see someone, anyone do a modern version of a Sundog-like game, since our original was so constrained. My favorite is Space Rangers 2 (available via Impulse.com)...bruce..

Thanks for the kind words -- as I said, Wayne is working on a reboot. Wayne is one of the best coders and best game designers I know -- he was the brains behind Dungeon Master [wikipedia.org] -- and so whatever he comes up with should be great...bruce..

run twisty, twisty, kill someone.
run twisty, twisty, touch something
run twisty, twisty, kill twenty someones.
run twisty, wind up behind a closing door and kill a big someone with helpers.
get a new style for your armor.

Lots of people have wanted to do space games. I've wanted to as well. A key part about doing such a thing with multiplayer (or even just the internet now) for me has been the use of computing. Folks have been building aimbots forever. What if the rules of the universe, and the ships, were only roughly (and/or inaccurately) described, and each player/ship had a limited amount of processing to figure them out and optimize the ship?

So I see Notch has a working 6502 emulator, and even a crude display system.

Not directly related to your post, but take a look at http://nassp.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] . It's an add-on to the "Orbiter" spaceflight simulator with models of the Apollo spacecraft, including an emulated guidance computer that runs actual AGC code.

I keep coming back to this quirky game because it starts with a space ship and from there you have the standard fare (trading, missions, fighting, mining, etc.), purchasable upgrades, treasure hunts,...

However it also includes a tactical fight/FPS hook, adventure text missions, a kind of arcade game, upgrading local command posts (though you can't fight enemy ones, and yes Pirate bases are my enemies), staving off alien invasions... Oh so much good stuff. When it decides to work correctly... Though about

Eve Online is anything you want it to be. It has no arbitrarily imposed goals, you choose your own destiny and how you get there.

Goals are not the only important parts. To pay an adventure game, you need affordances which Eve doesn't provide; for example, not being able to walk inside your own ship automatically disqualifies Eve as a potential candidate for the game Notch is describing.

In a set of stories I'm writing, there's an effective speed limit of 0.1c. You can go faster than that, but then you risk sand-grain-sized particles getting through your shields. It may be a bit hand-wavey, but it keeps in-system speeds down to where it actually takes a few hours to get from one place to another. Plus, it's slow enough that you can pretty much ignore relativity which makes my brain hurt.

then you want to play Frontier, which was the sequel to Elite. It has relativistic combat... and it was shite. You and the enemy ship hurtled towards each other, then past each other with a fraction of a second where they were close enough to hit each other, then turn around for the slow decel, and then repeat all over again. dull.

Now, a "real-life" space-game would be much more like Harpoon (an old naval combat system) where you'd chuck remote missiles at each other which would be intelligent enough to do

or mod the game so the Death Star is taking out the U.S.S. Enterprise with the Battlestar Galactica at its flank? (and Col. O'Neil with Samantha Carter busy working to take out the main reactor core of the Death Star)?

I think the game you are looking for is called StarFarer. http://fractalsoftworks.com/ [fractalsoftworks.com]
It's still in alpha, but it's progressing well so far, and the alpha is playable and modable today.

I have also been playing EvE for a long time, and would REALLY love for Notch to take a shot at giving EvE a run for its money. CCP is a little too used to no real competition and could REALLY use some. Plus I could see Notch taking a 'graphics are secondary' approach rather then CCP's 'graphics are uber important ooh look at the shiney!'.

An EvE like game focusing on trade and war rather then pewpew could be awesome.

You're mixing up "Psychonauts 2" with "Double Fine Adventure" (a working title). The former, Notch offered to be an investor, but the amount he offered isn't enough on its own to actually get the game made. The latter is a different game by the same developers, and is the one that was funded by Kickstarter.

Minecraft really isn't made to support those things. Chunks are 16 by 16 by 256 and don't stack vertically, so that rather limits manoeuvrability. Also given that space is mostly empty it really wouldn't make sense to use the minecraft level format, which isn't very sparse...

While there are no doubt ways to hack around such builtin limitations, it would probably be easier, faster, and vastly more efficient performance-wise to create a new game engine.